


spitting halogen light

by kiaronna



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Implied/Referenced Sex, Limbo, Love Confessions, M/M, Military!Arthur, Military!Eames, Miscommunication, Pining, References to Drugs, brief ptsd discussions, liberal n dubious use of source material, why don't those tags just automatically go on by now for me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:15:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22618471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiaronna/pseuds/kiaronna
Summary: “Dom wouldn’t stop telling me the rules for architects,” Ariadne grins, swinging her legs, “so surely there are rules for forgers, too?”“The only rule, pet, is that there are no rules,” Eames lies. “A forger can be anyone and anything they choose. It’s the whole point.”Eames didn’t become the best forger by passing out his trade secrets like flyers on the street. There are plenty of rules: don’t bring yourself into your roles. Unless you can speak Russian in your sleep, don’t try to do it in someone else’s dream. If it’s your subconscious, forge as little as possible—they know it’s you. They’ll always know. It doesn’t mean they like you being something you’re not. Always forge sober.Never forge a person you love, because you have no idea how the rest of the world sees them.Unlike Cobb, Eames never broke his rules. Until he did.
Relationships: Arthur/Eames (Inception)
Comments: 24
Kudos: 225





	spitting halogen light

**Author's Note:**

> hello i am very rusty but they put Inception on netflix, so what's a weak woman to do

“Why are you staying with him?” Eames asks, once. The needle in Cobb’s arm barely there, flickering in the dim light when Cobb shifts in his dream. “He’s out of control. To be perfectly honest, it’s nothing like what I thought you’d tolerate.”

Someone so regulated seems out of place, in this.

Arthur narrows his eyes at him. “The point man is meant to be the reliable one, Eames.”

And because Eames is cruel, because Eames doesn’t care if there’s hurt so long as it’s necessary, he says, “Is this how you apologize for not being there, when they were in Limbo?”

Arthur’s quiet for a long, long time.

“The Cobbs didn’t know about Limbo until me.”

“You’ve never been,” Eames reminds him, because it can’t be, something is off.

“I don’t remember going there,” Arthur corrects. “And I won’t go again, if I can help it. That’s my rule.”

Eames had trained on the PASIV with the American military only a handful of times, but right before he was pulled out, there was a run where one of the men with them didn’t wake up.

Somnacin blend 2981DL, read the IV feeding into his arm.

One of the overseeing scientists rocked his chair, pinched him, until they turned to Eames, asked if Delancy had been down there with them.

“Of course,” Eames had told them. But he’d been shot, as the newer recruits were wont to do, and when he didn’t come back under, they’d all assumed it was intentional. Part of the exercise. Depleting numbers.

None of the other men, too shaken to be curious, cared to stick around and see. But Eames always wanted to learn, so he hung back, just out of sight.

“The third bad blend,” the scientist said.

“Will he wake up?” Their project head wanted to know.

“We’re not sure,” was the reply, but it was answered when, a few minutes later, Delancy woke.

Eames could tell, even though he was halfway gone, because of the screaming.

For a few days, in the mess hall, in the training room, Delancy looked—ancient. Exhausted. _Starved_. Eames didn’t like it. Eames had never considered forcing an honorable discharge for himself, before, but looking at Delancy—

Then that Tuesday, Delancy came into the mess hall, eager, ghosts back in their graves, like nothing ever happened.

 _Shit_ , Eames thought. The British government must’ve agreed, because the next week, his unit was gone.

Eames wonders if it’s the absence of memory that’s so telling, that makes Arthur sure he’s been in Limbo. He wonders how, if Arthur remembers none of the experience, he still knew enough to lay it, gleaming and dangerous, at the starving feet of the Cobbs.

None of these are questions he asks. That’s because there’s a look on Arthur’s face, one so rare it requires all of even Eames’ vast attention to capture.

Guilt, with a touch of sorrow, and all of it smoking with bitter remorse.

“Arthur,” Eames said, then. “Darling, if not you, the Cobbs would’ve found something else. Maybe something—worse.”

“I’m aware,” is Arthur’s reply. But it is that stony, worn reply given by a person who knows rationally they aren’t to blame, but can’t _believe_ it.

Eames could have been anyone—a businessman, a surgeon, a professional gambler, a president. He chose this life for himself, instead. With that same precision, he’s chosen Arthur. Everyone believes Arthur to be the meticulous, the planned, the perfect, but Eames can take that same precision and casually display it as suave chaos.

Now that he knows Arthur better, he knows this too: they are opposites. Beneath the clean, crisp lines of that Armani suit, Arthur is savage. Wild.

“We could’ve lost them both,” Eames tries, because he has to try, and those eyes whip up to his, dark and sharp.

“Did we not?”

Eames can’t deny it.

“Phillipa and James won’t.”

A promise Eames can keep. It doesn’t tame the beast clawing at Arthur’s chest, he knows, but maybe it’s the only thing that’s soothed it in a long time.

 _You don’t care about Cobb_ , he wants Arthur to snarl at him. And maybe that’s true. For all that they are criminals, Arthur has an inherent goodness in him. Madness, Eames would call it.

They sleep together that night, for the first time. It’s worth it, even when watching Arthur pull on his clothes and leave, after. It hurts in the same way being shot in your dreams hurts—intense, long-lasting, that moment between sleep and waking drawing out the pain. When you wake, there’s no one pitying you, not even yourself, because you’re still breathing. Still alive, and technically whole.

A brain riddled with non-existent bullets, leaking nightmares.

“Eames can handle anything,” a collaborator on their next shared job says.

“No,” Arthur replies, simply, unsmiling. Maybe he’s right. He definitely is. The stupid prick on the job would kill them both, if not for Arthur’s realism, his rules, his distrust. It still stings. It’s still stinging, even when the job is over.

* * *

Sometimes, Eames has to wonder whether people could learn to share dreams without a PASIV. If you just slept close enough, for long enough, deep enough—if you could overcome. Brains are more powerful than a PASIV, and the idea that they couldn’t accomplish the feat alone seems ludicrous.

But the idea is a romantic, conceptual one. You can’t connect by sheer closeness. Eames has tried. Is trying.

“Why are you staring at me?”

Eames had known Arthur wasn’t asleep, but assumed he was at least trying to be. That he wouldn’t really notice if Eames worked, for the hundredth time, on committing that face to memory while it was here.

“I sleep professionally,” Arthur says, eyes still closed. Eames has said that himself before, but he meant it as a joke. Arthur probably does, too, somewhere deeper. “Don’t need to do it as much in my personal time. You know this.”

“My resting brain waves look like a toddler abstract painting, true.”

Arthur refuses to be distracted.

“Don’t stare,” he says. “Or I’ll leave.”

“Aw, pet,” Eames says, in just a way that gives the illusion he doesn’t care. “It’s cold out.”

“I don’t know what you’re planning,” Arthur says, “when you look at me like that. I don’t like not knowing. So just don’t.”

Arthur’s a man who follows through. So Eames rolls to the other side of the bed, and plans without looking.

“So those are the rules, then,” he can’t help but throw in, just before sleep. In reply, Arthur neatly picks up his suit and his shoes, his watch on the nightstand. And Arthur leaves.

* * *

Because inception is rare and greedy capitalists are not, there’s always another bad job, with shady colleagues there just for a payout.

“A bit rough, aren’t we, darling?”

“Fucking _shit_ job,” Arthur hisses, and bites while he kisses. “Almost dead three times, because I do research and no one _listens_ to me.”

“Poor dear, I listen to—“

“Don’t _finish_ that sentence.”

“If you’re going to be rough and also make me stop talking, can’t you be more inventive about it?”

Unimpressed, Arthur pulls back. Flits assessing eyes over new and old bruises from jobs. Sometimes Eames wonders if, in certain lights, he can see all the track marks that never were. Level one and deeper. You can hurt, and not show it. You can do it, if you’re a forger, or a point man, or almost anyone in this business.

But Eames doesn’t dwell on this thought for long, because if he didn’t know better, he’d say a _blush_ is splattering over Arthur’s high cheekbones.

“I don’t like hurting people,” Arthur says, suddenly. It’s frightening, to think he can read Eames’ thoughts, but then he follows with, “I don’t want to knock you around, or gag you, or—or push a gun in your mouth instead of my tongue.” His lips press together tighter. “I get enough of that shit on the job. I don’t want it here.”

“Proper romantic, aren’t you. Or did the army starch and iron the dirty thoughts out of you?”

Arthur snorts. “Like those are the thoughts they’d care to erase.”

 _So what did they_ , Eames wants to ask, and doesn’t. It seems too close a question, for a hotel room this massive, a space between them while Arthur visibly debates whether they are even compatible for—this. Not at work, not at home, not here.

Eames likes working with Arthur because he’s reliable, and yet still interesting, and can be teased into fun. Eames likes Arthur because in a world of junkies and madmen and people who push boundaries not to _understand_ but just to gain power—in all of that. Arthur just chose a career that stimulated him, and he has hobbies. Interests. Arthur wears double breasted suits and polished shoes. Arthur likes Sudoku, and logic puzzles, and the physics of deep space, he likes psychology and yoga, and trivia so obscure even Eames’ rabid devouring of information struggles to keep up.

His point man feels like a person. A real person. A whole dynamic and living person. Something Eames, made of slippery shadows, isn’t sure he’s ever been. Everyone else in the whole bloody dreamshare business takes rules and breaks, and breaks, and _breaks_. Nothing is real for them. Not waking life and not dreams and not the restrictions you impose on yourself. Arthur takes rules and he makes them better. Arthur gives chaos meaning.

Yet Arthur only works with Eames because, for lack of any other positive quality, he’s the best forger there’s been.

Eames has _plans_ for Arthur, intentions. No matter how meandering, or indirect. This early in the game, he can’t afford to be losing his way in, either on the job or here.

 _What would I want_ , he has to think, _if I was a beast in a cage of my own creation._

The answer he finds is surprising.

“They experimented on us too,” Eames says, “eventually.”

Eames is smoke and shadow, and through the bars of Arthur’s cage, he can slip right in. Make him less alone. Eames hates to say it, hates to play this particular card, partially because it’s true. You learn how to forge, that first time, because you’d rather be anyone but yourself.

This time, Arthur doesn’t leave right away.

* * *

In Paris, Eames wakes from a nightmare and finds Arthur already up, barefooted and quiet in the sickly moonlight of the flat’s fire escape.

“Did I wake you?” Eames asks, and Arthur gives him a sideways glance for the two seconds before he figures it out, shakes his head.

“Up for the same reason as you.”

They sit in silence. In the night air Eames regrets not throwing on a robe, until Arthur leans a warm cheek on his shoulder. Then it’s all right.

“They told me I wouldn’t be able to dream without a PASIV, eventually. They meant to scare me. Didn’t realize it would be a perk.”

“Every benefit of dreamshare comes with a warning label,” Arthur says, shrugging. “Or should.”

“What does mine read, darling?”

There’s no reaction, just Arthur swinging his long legs in circles, staring down to the streets—still crawling with Parisians. The nightlife of Europe.

“I don’t like this job,” Arthur says, then. “The architect’s a nervous wreck and I’m pretty sure I saw our chemist trying to snort Somnacin.”

“I mean,” Eames begins, raising an eyebrow, and Arthur shoves him just hard enough for him to grab at the railing of the stairs, grinning.

“Better than smoking it?” Arthur guesses, wryly, correctly, and Eames rewards him.

Kissing in Paris, by moonlight, almost makes the job worth it. Eames doesn’t bother wondering what made it worth the risk for Arthur.

* * *

In Germany their mark—who was supposed to be un-militarized, vanilla, and some stupid trust fund kid—turns out to be an all-natural bloody _lucer_.

“This isn’t how I designed it,” their designated dreamer keeps insisting, but Eames has long since stopped listening to him.

“It was theoretical,” Arthur says, eyes sparkling despite the fact that he hates when things don’t go according to plan, and they’re running for their lives. “Supposed to be purely theoretical—“

“Only a matter of time,” Eames dismisses, pleased. “Even if the chances of someone having the right brain chemistry with Somnacin are so low—“

“Forgive me for working with the assumption that one in a billion should be synonymous with _never_ in a practical sense, Eames.”

“Where’s the fun in that, dar—“

“Are either of you going to fucking explain a single thing?” Their former dreamer screams.

“This,” Eames says, waving his gun in an arc, shooting every few degrees like a madman, “is no longer your dream.” The walls where he’s shot sputter and drip, like melting caramel instead of brick. They’re running because the floor is falling to pieces in the space behind them, the sky flickering between day and night like some rave from Eames’ drug-addled teenage youth.

“A lucer can be put under,” Arthur adds, managing to sound serious even while they’re panting and fleeing, “but they take over the dreamer role every time. A biological glitch for the PASIV system, a whole rerouting of the setup, so the dream is—“

“ _Melting?”_

“You’re fighting to be the dreamer,” Eames corrects, merciless, “and you’re losing.”

Neither of them really knows what happens if you lose that battle. Not even theoretically.

“Eames,” Arthur says, because he is about to be a decent person. A world of thieves and billionaires and addicted academics makes for piss-poor colleagues. Yet still he and Arthur get attached. Eames hates that about him; hates too that Arthur’ll check with Eames first. That he expects Eames—a bastard to the first degree— to also make the right choice.

Maybe if it was robbing their former dreamer blind, or breaking his arm, or wheedling out all his secrets, Eames would make the wrong one. But letting him drop into Limbo? Death? Maybe somewhere worse than either of those places, in the dark recesses of a mind?

Even Eames has moral boundaries. He definitely has rules. And Arthur, the fucker he’s in love with, has mapped them out. He’d expected this. But not so soon. Not when Arthur will still barely look him in the eye, in hotels and back alleys and once, just once, in a flat so meticulously well-positioned Eames knew it had to be one of Arthur’s safe houses.

“Do it,” Eames sighs, and Arthur shoots their designated dreamer point blank in the skull.

“Now what,” Arthur says flatly. At least the walls are beginning to resemble walls, again.

“I wouldn’t classify myself as an academic,” Eames says, holstering his gun, “but I’d say our lucer is something worth studying.”

Their lucer, it turns out, is willing to make a deal.

“Dreamshare,” she repeats, rolling the word around in her mouth. “…and you say it’s lucrative?”

“I _told_ you,” Arthur mutters to Eames, because between their extractor, their dreamer, and Eames, he was the only one to mention that their vapid little heiress had actually been quite ruthless in business and art school. Eames had paid attention, but only to alter his forging approach for her.

“Explain,” she says, firmly. “Unless I won’t remember, when I wake up.” It isn’t the last time they go under with her.

It’s certainly fun, watching someone in a previously unknown specialty of dreamshare stretch their brain out. Eames remembers slipping into skin after skin, dancing across every conscious he could sneak into through a needle. Stepping in front of an infinite mirror to see every forge, reflected back at him. The first time he forged for hours in a dream he populated and his own projection stabbed him in his newly green eyes, again and again and again and—

“ _That_ ,” Amber gasps upon waking, once, “never _fucking_ doing that again.”

Eames has been there, shaking like a bad trip. Sometimes that’s really all dreamshare is.

“It’s easier,” he admits, “if you figure out the rules.”

“The rules,” she spits, “like this is a game.”

Eames doesn’t tell her that everything can be a game, if you make it. That sometimes it’s easier that way.

“Dom wouldn’t stop telling me the rules for architects,” Ariadne had told him once, swinging her legs off her desk, “so surely there are rules for forgers, too?”

“The only rule, pet, is that there are no rules,” Eames lied. “A forger can be anyone and anything they choose. It’s the whole point.”

Eames didn’t become the best forger by passing out his trade secrets like flyers on the street. There are plenty of rules: _don’t bring yourself into your roles. Unless you can speak Russian in your sleep, don’t try to do it in someone else’s dream. If it’s your subconscious, forge as little as possible—they know it’s you. They’ll always know. It doesn’t mean they like you being something you’re not. Always forge sober._

_Never forge a person you love, because you have no idea how the rest of the world sees them._

Unlike Cobb, Eames never broke his rules. Until he did.

* * *

Eames watches the wing of the airplane they’re on fall off in a charred, flaming arc. On any normal plane, they’d already be done for.

“Switch places with me,” Arthur orders, calm as ever. It should be a simple request. Their newly traitorous team members don’t know Eames is under—or at least, they don’t know his current alias is capable of forging—and only Arthur knows the layout of this place well enough to extract the information. Eames should forge Arthur. Wrap himself up in the rope. Take a few knocks meant for the other man, and buy the real Arthur time while their pursuers assume he’s neutralized.

It’s a clean plan. It’s not particularly imaginative, because Arthur came up with it, but it’s practical. It would be successful—if not for one thing.

“I can’t,” Eames says.

“I don’t care if it holds up to your _artistic standards_ ,” Arthur snaps. “Whether you’ve practiced my uptight walk or put enough knots in your shoulders. This job is going to shit. I need you.”

_I need you._

The words hit him hard, and that’s exactly why. Exactly why: “it won’t work.”

Arthur’s look is scathing.

“Why,” he says coldly, simply.

There are approximately fifty forgers in the entire world. There are probably more that _call_ themselves forgers, who can hold their false glamour, but Eames only counts the ones with respectable work. Explaining the details would be impossible, even if he knows Arthur would soak them up, all that serious attention focused on Eames, as the dream falls apart around them.

It’s easier to show.

He steps into the forge, into the scars and the clean-pressed suit, the dark eyes. Every line of Arthur, every mannerism that Eames has ever seen and filed away, in that safe in his mind he knows everyone keeps.

It should be perfect, because Eames has spent more time with Arthur, studying Arthur, than any other target he’s ever forged.

But it’s not, and Eames knows this, and he knows _why_.

“That’s not what I look like,” Arthur says softly. “I’m…”

There’s gunfire elsewhere in the building, but it still seems so quiet.

“It’s what you look like to me.”

Eames shrugs—it’s Arthur’s uncomfortable shrug, small and controlled. The hint of a roll of his neck.

But it’s too simplified, because there’s so much Eames knows about Arthur. The last time Arthur gave this shrug, they were in bed. Eames had asked what he wanted, broad and general, safely open. Arthur is a man who specializes in details, in folders and lists and planning. All he’d given as answer was that shrug.

 _You’re unhappy_ , Eames had thought. He did not think, _I wish I could make you happy_. Neither he nor Arthur are fans of wishful thinking. It would happen, if Eames succeeded, or it wouldn’t.

Other forges don’t matter, because he doesn’t _know_ them, because the forge is good _enough_.

How could Eames capture that complexity, that perfection, that imperfection, in a dream?

How can he forge, when he doesn’t believe in the forge himself?

“Romantic,” Arthur notes, dry, and Eames wants to shoot him. It feels like mockery. As Almost-Arthur, he would, so he raises the gun that’s now a glock. Then: “You’re a romantic.”

This is why Eames can’t forge him. It’s not mockery—just observation.

“You knew,” he accuses, in Arthur’s own voice.

Arthur’s brows furrow. “I didn’t. When we’re not being hunted and shot and have left the flaming airplane, we can deal with it.”

This is another thing he and Arthur share: compartmentalization. Eames has his forges, all of them, and Arthur has his Plan A, and B, and C. When he runs out of plans he has priorities, instead.

“Deal with it,” he repeats, flatly.

There’s a flash of _something_ in Arthur’s eyes, then, sharp and defensive.

“Yes, Eames,” is the curt reply. “Forgive me for not wanting to have a delicate discussion, years in the making, in the midst of a firefight.”

“Oh, _delicate_?” Eames mocks, “what’s so delicate about you telling me to sod off, darling?”

Arthur rolls his eyes, and Eames rolls them right back, that frustratingly imperfect imitation.

Arthur stares at him, afterwards. Like he can see past the gelled hair and the mirrored face, even past the man beneath, right through to Eames’ heart.

“Less talking,” Arthur says. “More finishing this extraction and getting the hell out. If you can’t forge me, we’ll have to do this the hard way.”

The hard way involves a lot of shooting, and inventing a gun that really only works in dreams, so it’s the desperate kind of fun they both live for. Eames really needs to stop showing Arthur his tricks—he shows Arthur a better gun, a way to avoid the attention of projections, and Arthur, the anal little perfectionist, meticulously tests the limits of possibility.

Cobb is such a wet blanket. Now that he’s out of the game, Arthur’s back to being prickly, ruthless, and discerning. Now that he’s out of the game, Arthur’s back to licking his lips at Eames on shared jobs, and shaking out the ashes of their horrific military experiences all over each other, and sleeping as far away on the bed as he can manage.

There’s a wildness in that, in Arthur-and-Eames together, and Eames knows that means Arthur has constructed rules to contain it. Eames’ only chance of self-preservation has been avoiding them.

They practically kick their own way out of the dream, and Eames wouldn’t expect anything less.

* * *

They wake up long before their captors, but both of them correctly assume there must be an armed lookout or two. Once they’ve dealt with them, that just leaves—

They’re settled in the grimy backseat of a taxi, Arthur frowning at a missing button on his sleeve.

“When are you coming by my room?”

Eames almost dismisses the question as a memory. But Arthur’s still sitting there, looking vaguely repulsed by the cab and their state.

“Forgive me,” he says slowly, “I’m not particularly in the mood to blow your mind, right now. In case you’ve forgotten, we’ll have our former colleagues hunting us down. Along with whoever hired them. Honestly, you’re normally the one concerned about these things, while I grab a Glock and go on my way.”

Arthur has stopped rolling the string where his button used to be between his fingers.

“I expected you to bring your bags. I’ll have us international plane tickets by the time you stuff your belongings in.”

Eames doesn’t bring any belongings he cares for on business trips to this country. Eames slowly turns to look at the point man. “We’ll be easier to find in a pair. You know this. We should separate.”

“But then we wouldn’t be _together_ ,” Arthur enunciates, eyes narrowing, like he’s talking to a particularly dull child.

“Darling,” Eames says then, refusing to flinch at the pet name that now feels self-flagellating, dishonest, “perhaps you’ll think this sentimental of me, but I may need some time to myself. After the revelations of today.”

The cab stops at their hotel. Arthur is still staring at him.

“I thought we could discuss the mechanics of our relationship on the plane,” Arthur says, then shrugs, “but it seems that might be too late. Apparently it’ll have to be now.”

 _Relationship mechanics_ , Eames mouths at him as they swiftly pass from the cab through the hotel lobby. “You psychopath.” Arthur narrows his eyes. He and Eames are on the same floor, but they purchased two rooms. They’d foolishly been sleeping in only one, despite the security of that plan being debatable.

Eames practically stalks the point man down the hall, because it’s clear that Arthur is demanding a lack of space, and Eames can certainly give that to him. Even if it hurts.

“Perhaps you’ve forgotten,” he says, “but every time the remaining fractions of Cobol engineering or some hit group make an attempt on our lives, we get on the blacklist of more thugs. I don’t know about you, but the idea of going underground and gradually assassinating a string of wretched men— rather than sitting on a beach drinking martinis at the height of my illustrious career –doesn’t sound appealing. Maybe I should start brushing up on my French, or my Mandarin. Shall we have the _relationship mechanics_ discussion in one of those? Hmm, Arthur? Shall we—”

“Can’t you stop being a pontificating ass for two seconds, Eames?” Arthur bursts, and jams his hand into his suit, past the gun, to the pocket with the room key. It’s almost embarrassing, that Eames doesn’t even bother to prepare for the possibility that Arthur might shoot him. Years, they’ve been doing this with each other. Despite every blockade, every warning label, Eames hasn’t prepared to be this relaxed. This trusting. He opens his mouth, because apparently he is a pontificating ass:

“I didn’t know American schools even taught that vocabulary word—“

Arthur throws one hand up, a wordless, annoyed acceptance.

“Fine,” he grits. They practically slam the hotel room door opening it. Arthur shoves past him, to his bag, and Eames starts unscrewing the back of the television, so he can grab Arthur’s papers for him. “Thank you,” Arthur says, clipped, because he noticed despite the fact that his back is turned.

But Eames never leaves things alone. “So many nights when you didn’t want to really talk to me,” he digs in, “but you press the advantage when you know it’s in your hand, don’t you.”

Arthur stiffens, turns just his head to blink at Eames, almost dubious.

“Like you talked to _me_. Do you think I invite all my colleagues to bed me in my safe houses, Eames?”

“Oh _do_ you, that’s something lush to think about—“

The lecherous play falls flat, because Arthur clenches his fists and gives a frustrated burst of a sound.

“You constructed all these rules to keep yourself safe,” Arthur states, but he almost _implores_ , half accuses. “And clearly my input on our relationship was not getting factored in to those grand calculations.”

“Look at me,” Eames says, arms spreading wide. There’s blood splatter across the unbuttoned upper half of his patterned dress shirt. His arm is turning a mottled purple, from when he’d ripped the IV line out faster than he should’ve, so he could whip about and shoot the sniper staring them down from the window. Eames has spent the last two weeks in five different countries: England. Thailand. France. Namibia. Mombasa—so when Arthur inevitably called, loose and sated from some job he didn’t share with Eames, he wouldn’t be tempted to drop everything and go, and Arthur would refuse to come to him. “I don’t seem like a rule follower to you, do I, Arthur?”

“ _That’s all you do_ ,” Arthur hisses. “Careful construction is what you _are_ , Eames.”

No one has ever said it before. Even when Eames suspected someone, like his mother, intrinsically knew.

Arthur slams his suitcase shut, zips it shut with finality.

“And after everything,” he says finally, quietly, “you never chose to tell me that you loved me. You never decided that it was time, that I was—that I’d finally _earned_ it, or whatever about me that was holding us back.”

Eames sucks in a breath.

“I didn’t have to forge you.”

God, it’d been a love confession. Eames hates himself, hates Arthur, hates dreamshare.

“Is that really how you see me?” Arthur says, then. Almost thoughtful, cloud-light. “Like I try to be perfect, and unrealistically beautiful, but I’m just… _wrong_ , somehow? How am I supposed to fix that, Eames? Fucking—give me something to do,” he’s almost choked up, but steely, furious, “and I’ll do it. I’ll blast my dream brains out. I’ll plant ideas in someone’s head. I’ll steal whole lifetimes for you. I’m a mess but if you just _let me plan_ —“

Eames doesn’t see Arthur as he truly is. In all that lovely complexity. Just reflected lights, beautiful, more beautiful than he can imagine, passing over his skin. No, Eames will never truly see the real Arthur. He’d never considered that Arthur might not, either.

“Arthur,” he says carefully, the bitterness gone, “my forge felt wrong because I love you too much to ever feel I’ve got you _right_. Like a specter in a dream—“ _like Dom’s Mal_ “—I could envision you a million ways, and it’s just an—illusion.”

“So,” Arthur begins, disbelieving of it all, “so, you love me… and never tell me… because _what_?”

It seems ridiculous now, and small.

“I had a plan,” Eames says. “That wasn’t seen through. Or so I thought. One to make you love me back.”

“ _Eames_.”

That one use of his name, and Eames feels things clicking. This is how Arthur says his name, when he thinks Eames is playing too hard and loose, but he likes it. When he’s ready to rein Eames in, or egg him on, and which way it goes doesn’t really matter to either of them.

“Look at us,” Arthur says. He’s in the midst of gathering up their clothes, his ties strewn in between khakis and boots, because if a tie wrinkled Arthur would toss it, so it wasn’t worth stopping their desperate push towards the bed last night, and Eames was dropping his clothes with the express purpose of making their union seem less routine and organized, more like an accident, an unstoppable urge.

But this is always what they do. What they have been doing, for years now. Even past Dom’s dark periods, and Eames’ questionable decisions, and Arthur’s occasional anger. Especially through holding each other during nightmares, and always switching new coffee and new beds to drink in together in the mornings, but never switching out each other. Arthur burying his face into Eames’ collarbone every chance he got, these damp breaths and dangerous hands.

“We’ve been in love a while, haven’t we.”

After he’s said it, he knows it’s right. You can playact words, read them like lines, and only then realize they’re true to you. That you’re deeper in the part than you thought.

“Why do you think I pretend to not enjoy working with you?”

“ _Pretend_ ,” Eames barks out with a laugh. “You’re always so—so bloody frustrated, Arthur, I can read people.”

The corner of Arthur’s lip quirks, and he confirms: “frustrated, Eames. Yes. Tense, you might even say.”

“ _Sexually_ ,” Eames realizes, with all the joy of a horny teenager.

“And you always mock me for not having any creative imagination,” Arthur grumbles. “Here I am, trying to flirt _subtly_ in front of a bunch of our idiot co-conspirators, who’d gladly sell feelings—“ he rolls his eyes, like he can’t believe he’s even being forced to vocalize this “—out to the highest bidder. If someone was trying to hurt us—to hurt you. To hurt me through you.”

He doesn’t quite finish the thought. It’s still grimly, fiercely drawn all over his face. Eames gently redirects.

“Our strategies were simply different. The overdramatic isn’t taken seriously, darling.”

Arthur goes quiet. The single, accidental _darling_ is still dangling from his lips. Arthur is focused far away, like he can’t stand to look and see it there, hands gripping the zipper of his bag.

“I take everything seriously,” Arthur says, finally. “I tried to follow my rules, as a point-man. Don’t be too attached. Don’t prioritize any member of the team. Don’t get involved in a job unless you’re sure everyone is at least half committed. Don’t get distracted and let the details get away from you, especially not because someone you’re hopelessly in love with thinks it’s fun to kick your chair like a damn child. I’ve broken every single rule in the job and outside of it for you, Eames. Now I’m trying to make better ones. Be attached so I can be better. Prioritize the man I love. Get involved in whatever I please, so long as I have you covering me. Pay attention to every single, ridiculous detail about you. You love costumes and boxing and Virginia Woolf’s _To the Lighthouse_ and you plan so many moves ahead in the games you play with me that you never stop to ask _why I’m still playing at all._ Or just tell me _what you want._ So _tell me_.”

The two passports smack Eames in the chest. He barely catches them as they tumble down into his arms, and he can’t help but look.

 _Conrad Doyle,_ reads the first. _Nick Rimbaud_ reads the second. Both, of course, bear Arthur’s likeness.

Eames is often a fool, but only when he calculates that it’ll end up fine. This is not one of those times. He asks the question he needs to.

“Which one is married?”

The relaxation is instant. Eames wants to work the knots out of his shoulders— _maybe on the plane_ , he thinks distantly.

“Guess,” Arthur commands.

And Eames knows everything will be all right.

“Rimbaud seems like a loving fellow.”

“Yes,” Arthur confirms. “A shame he can’t lovingly fuck his new husband until we’re over the Atlantic, with all the time we’ve wasted.”

“I don’t know about _over_ the Atlantic,” Eames says, zipping his bag and throwing it over his shoulder. “I need time and more space than an airplane loo for all I’ve planned with you.”

Arthur sighs and turns around, but Eames can _feel_ the wicked grin being directed at his bag.

“Later,” he’s promised.

In foreign hotels and on planes and in dreams and on the run. So many potential _laters_ , for them to be together in. Limitless. Eames spent years constructing it, and somehow he never actually stopped to picture what it’d be like. To enjoy living in the now, with someone that wild. To be in love.

The rest of their lives, they’ll make new rules together to figure it out.

**Author's Note:**

> I've never actually written these kids before and my typical fare is cotton candy, as opposed to guns n espionage, so y'all get whatcha get and I'm sorry  
> also thank you for reading  
> title from the band "bad bad hats" who I adore right now  
> strongly debated taking a lyric from "new rules" by dua lipa to be ~on theme~ but it felt trashy. I am already trashy. Do not need to become moreso


End file.
